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To David, love meant declaration. Wasn’t that the whole point? To Sarah, love meant a shared secret. Wasn’t that the whole point? Sarah
There is something else about the Movement teacher Sarah vaguely dislikes. She’s not sure how to feel when she realizes her dislike stems from the fact that the new teacher is female.
We’ve all had this dream, Sarah thinks. The dream in which, to the world’s surprise and our own, we turn out to be best.
that was fifteen in a nutshell, she’ll think when she’s twice, and then three times, that age. The obvious and the oblivious sharing the same mental space.
Having just, at long last, received her own license, a milestone the enormity of which is equaled only by its sense of anticlimax and its failure to grant her relief from her pain,
When we were children, or students, or whatever we were at the place we’ll refer to as CAPA, we were taught that a moment of intimacy had no meaning unless it was part of a show. The ways we liked and hated and envied and bullied and punished each other never seemed satisfyingly real unless Mr. Kingsley put them onstage during Trust Exercises,
right away her gaze went hard with the anger we always feel at the person who spoils our idea of ourself.
furniture. In high school, Karen and Sarah had done everything to their hair they could think of except take care of it. They had bleached it, shaved it, permed it, dyed it, as girls do when vandalizing themselves seems the best way of proving their bodies are theirs.
aware. This made Karen think about the historical problem she had of tending to try to please other people, even strangers, for less than no reason. She’d always hoped that making this problem historical—acknowledged and documented—would leave it behind in the past, but so far that hadn’t worked out.
Being curious toward, interested in, David made me feel like I’d bought into him, made a choice. By contrast, being obsessed by Sarah was a form of enslavement. “Obsess” comes from the Latin obsessus, past participle of obsidere, from ob- (against or in front of) + sedere (to sit) = “sit opposite to” (literal) = “to occupy, frequent, besiege” (figurative). When we say we are obsessed, we say we’re possessed, controlled, haunted by something or somebody else. We are beset, under siege. We can’t choose. I was obsessed with Sarah, meaning obsessed by her, deprived by her very existence of some
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Everything about the car represented David’s broken promise to take care of Sarah, as if David was more—or should have been more—than just another fucked-up teenage kid. Why was David responsible for her? What about the adults in their lives?
Karen realized that she had known all along that Sarah, if given the chance, would ignore Karen’s emotional truth if she was offered an emotional falsehood that made her feel better.
